Julie Knorr of HESP UMD will be defending her Honor's Thesis on Online Conflict-Based Regulation in Language Production.

Abstract: Speakers produce language quickly with few errors, despite undergoing several complex steps, from message planning to phoneme production, that all have many competing alternatives. However, when an error is made, speakers are able to correct themselves, which demonstrates that they are monitoring for errors and adjusting behavior accordingly. How are speakers able to detect errors and ensure that they are saying what they mean to say? This thesis focused on testing the type of conflicting monitoring that language production undergoes. Does language production utilize a monitor that is specific to production alone (domain-specific), or does it engage across multiple domains even outside of language (domain-general)? This experiment examined the adjustment of control within the linguistic Picture-Word Interference (PWI) and nonlinguistic Simon tasks. Using a task switching paradigm, conflict adaptation between tasks and within the same task was analyzed. Results showed within-task conflict adaptation in both PWI and Simon tasks, but not adaptation across the two tasks. These findings support a domain-specific model of monitoring and control in language production.